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Thursday, December 13, 2012

How-To: Step 1 of Your Private Cloud Journey

While clouds are all the rage – who knew some condensed water would ever get this popular? – you might not know where to start developing a cloud infrastructure of your very own. But good news on that front – today is your lucky day. We’re here to help guide you on your cloud journey.

Where should you start? Should you choose a private, public or a hybrid approach? Is out-sourcing less critical functions and building out an existing infrastructure the right hybrid cloud model for your organization? We are focused on helping organizations deliver IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and we can help you find the right answers to these questions.

First off, in building your next generation data center, it’s important to create a customized private cloud solution in order to take full advantages of the multi-tenancy, agility, availability, and scalability benefits that private clouds offer. To begin developing your private cloud, you need the crucial elements that make up a private cloud: shared storage, network infrastructure, high compute servers (virtualized preferably), and most importantly, cloud-optimized software. To let you in on a secret, it’s the software that really takes the hardware and turns into a true private cloud solution.

HP and VMware lead the pack in providing comprehensive, easy-to-manage, converged infrastructure products that make your cloud deployment virtually turn-key. The 5 distinct layers of this private cloud solution are the hypervisor, advanced management, and standardized hardware including servers, networking, and storage. Additional elements that are essential building blocks for your private cloud include self-service portals, policy-based controls, targeted independence, elasticity and automated deployment and maintenance.

Once you are aware of all of these features, then you can began developing your in-house cloud with the help of a solutions provider such as Great Lakes Computer with your eyes wide open.